The Untold Story of SAIC, Network Solutions, and the Rise of the Web—Part 1

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other senior executives as the San Diego defense conglomerate went on something of an acquisition binge—targeting small IT companies and government contractors. From 1990 through 1995, SAIC was acquiring six to nine such companies a year.

In 1992, the NSF sought competitive bids for a private contractor to register and manage Internet domain names under a “cooperative agreement.” The foundation selected Network Solutions Inc (NSI), which was among just five bidders that responded to the NSF solicitation. Daniels recalls: “It was a $1.5 million fixed-price contract for NSI to run the Internet domain name business. They had no idea—none of us did—what was going to happen with domain names in the next three years.”

Yet Daniels says he sensed something big was about to happen. He says he had seen Steve Case, who was one of his friends in Northern Virginia’s technology community, turn a company in Arlington called Quantum Computer Services into America Online. He began making regular business trips to meet with other technology leaders in Silicon Valley. “I just had the sense that these guys in Silicon Valley were going to push into the Internet,” Daniels says.

J. Robert Beyster

At SAIC, Daniels continued to meet with Emmit McHenry, Network Solutions’ president and CEO, and sought to acquire the little company based in Herndon, VA, on behalf of SAIC. “I probably made five or six offers from ’94 to March of ”95, when they finally agreed,” Daniels recalls. “So we bought Network Solutions. The idea was to build up the networking business they got, build up their networking technology capabilities in government contracting, and then I was going to take a look at this domain name business they had.”

The timing of SAIC’s buyout was lucky indeed. As Daniels puts it, “Nobody really understood that NSI basically had an exclusive contract to sell dot-com, dot-net, and dot-org to every human being on the planet… But people just didn’t see it. They just didn’t understand what the potential was.”

On the other hand, Daniels says, “If we had not come in and purchased Network Solutions, nobody knows what would have happened.” The orders for Internet domain names that began flooding in during the Internet boom years “required financial, technical, and management capability that they did not have.”

Exactly how SAIC helped to scale up NSI’s operations, then turn it into one of the most profitable monopolies in the history of the Internet, are the subjects of my full Q&A with Beyster and Daniels—so watch this space tomorrow.

Stopped reading after the first page. This isn’t a fucking book, stop dividing up your site into pages.

Agreed

What’s with multiple pages? All it did was encourage me to adblock everything on the site. I would have been fine with them if the article was just one page.

anonymouse

Ditto. This multiple page crap is absurd. Get real.

Brendan

And for some reason all the paragraphs are centered on my blackberry. Yuck

http://www.slickdeals.net tomsherm

Well, if the goal was to discourage me from reading what should be a good article – they did it! Ironic that a story about the birth of key internet partners is posted on a site that has no business being ON the internet – ugh – why ruin a story with “just TRY and read it” formatting?